T Parker - L. A. Outlaws

Hood forced down the dinner and thought of what Madeline had said. The past is now… a grave and a birthplace… it’s all one instant…

His father looked at him. “I hate my life.”

Hood drank at a bar in Hollywood, watched the Dodgers beat the Cards, chatted up two nurses from Chicago and came back late to Silver Lake.

His cell rang as he came through his door.

“Talk to me,” said Suzanne.

“Where are you?”

“Far from you and Lupercio.”

Hood toured the little one-bedroom place to make sure everything looked the way he had left it, a habit and nothing more. He turned off the lights and sat in the dark in his living room.

“We shouldn’t talk here, like this,” he said.

“Remember Laguna, before you helped me check out?”

“Hard to forget.”

“Then walk across that sand in exactly two hours. Alone.”

Two hours later he walked alone across the sand north of Laguna’s Main Beach. The sky was close and starless and the moon trailed a river of silver on the water. The waves were small and sharp and they crashed hard. He remembered that the rock archway had been easy to find at low tide but now the tide was high and the beach was smaller and steeper.

He hugged the cliff to stay dry and when he was close enough to make out the shape of the archway Hood heard a crunching sound behind him.

Suzanne skidded down the cliff face and her boots landed quietly in the sand. Her face was mostly hidden under a cowboy hat, and she wore a faded denim jacket against the beach chill.

“Keep going,” she said. “Talk.”

Hood walked, and she almost caught up with him but not quite.

“I’ve got a leak,” he said.

“No shit. A cop. How many lives has he helped rub out?”

“Four for sure.”

“I liked my neighbors, Hood. I liked Gerald and Harold Little Chief. They were men. What were you thinking?”

“That I was working with good people. I am, mostly. I think I am.”

“That’s really damned comforting.”

“It’s a soul killer, woman.”

He stopped and turned, and Suzanne stopped, too. He looked at her and felt the good thrill of having her here, caught in his eyes, unmoving for this moment.

“When I found the transponder on my car I thought it was you.”

“It was not.”

“Prove it.”

“You know me is the only proof I’ve got.”

“You don’t strike me as a chickenshit coward.”

“I care about you.” Hood hadn’t planned to say that, had never quite said it to himself. It was against all the rules, but that list was long by now. The odd part was that he cared about Allison Murrieta, too.

She cocked her head slightly, as if to hear something better.

“All this, because I saw a guy one night.”

Hood knew that the only way to keep her close was to honor her lie. Back in Anbar he’d vowed to never honor a lie again-not after Lenny Overbrook’s false confession on behalf of the men who used him. Now he was doing it again.

“It was bad luck,” he said.

“What are you going to do about it? School starts in a few days and if I don’t work I don’t get paid.”

Past the archway they came to a place where the beach widened and the pitch of the cliff face softened. Hood looked up at a gazebo outlined atop the bluff in the faint moonlight.

Halfway up the stairs to the gazebo they stopped and Hood looked back at the beach below them and the soft black Pacific.

“There’s a way, Suzanne. There are two people other than me who’ve known where I was going, and where you might be. If I give each man a different place to find you, and Lupercio shows up at one of them-we’ll know.”

“Who are these assholes? How high up are they?”

“A sergeant and a captain.”

“Men, women, white, black?”

“It’s better you don’t know.”

“You don’t know what’s better for me. So we find the leak. Then what?”

“There’s internal affairs. There’s feds.”

“More cops. Great.”

They climbed to the top of the bluff and stood in the gazebo and looked down again. They were alone. Up here the breeze was stronger and Hood could hear the cars swooshing along behind them on Coast Highway. Suzanne brushed back her hat and the strap caught her throat. She stood in front of him. Over her shoulder he saw a restaurant long closed for the night and a lamplit patch of highway.

“I saw my boys today. It made me happy.”

“I’ll bet that made them happy, too.”

“I’m a good mother.”

Hood said nothing.

“I’ve raised them on independence and they know they’re loved. I’ve exposed them to good things, a lot of them. I’ve taught them to think for themselves, to be curious about everything and to doubt everything. I’ve never missed a birthday, a holiday or an illness. Well, not many.”

“They seem like good boys. Really. A good look in their eyes.”

“After you arrest Lupercio I’ll let you take me somewhere no one knows us. Somewhere beautiful. We’ll be lazy.”

“Ernest might not be too happy about that.”

“Listen. Ernest is a truly good man. But he knows that things end. I told him they would. And I told him that again, until he really got it. I wouldn’t take him until he understood that our time would be short. Because of that I treated him like a king.”

“I’ll stay out of that one.”

“You’re smack in the middle of it, Charlie. Here’s the deal: I’m not easy and I’m not property. I’m not up to you. I’m up to me. I’ll help you find your murder-loving boss and I’ll help you nail Lupercio. I want them both to rot in hell. I’ll trust you, Hood, but I’m still up to me. Those are my terms. Acceptable?”

“Those are fair.”

“Good, because I got us our old room at the hotel.”

So I’m down in Little Saigon, Orange County. The people here aren’t likely to know Suzanne Jones and there’s a nice little hotel on a side street built to look like a French one in old Saigon.

Hood needs time to set his trap and I have things to do.

First I get my hair cut short and dyed light blond. I tell the stylist to brush it back and let it fall where it falls. It’s chaos. Good. Sometimes a girl needs a change.

I meet in the afternoon with Quang, a jewelry maker and acquaintance of mine. We sit in the back of his shop on Bolsa with the front doors and the security screen locked tight and the OPEN sign turned out. Quang chain-smokes and when he smiles his face creases with wrinkles and smile lines. He’s been hit by armed robbers twice in the last four years and he won’t open up for anybody who doesn’t look right. Lots of the Vietnamese businesspeople keep their cash in floor safes right on the premises just like their parents taught them back in Vietnam, which encourages armed robbery. They’d be better off with their profits in banks but there’s no convincing them of that.

I sketch out a setting for Ernest’s ring, which will be an eleven-stone bolt of electricity on gold. Gold, because it looks so good against his dark Hawaiian skin.

Quang smokes and smiles and nods.

I draw a masculine silver ring setting for Bradley’s half-carat diamond, which will be mounted inside a crescent of lapis cut in the shape of a wave.

I sketch out a broad, flat fish with a trail of dorsal diamonds that will hang from Jordan’s neck. Both the fish and the chain will be brushed stainless steel, built to last.

Quang suggests a simple ring box for baby Kevin’s third-carat diamond, which I can set on his dresser until he’s old enough to wear something valuable. I think briefly of having Quang affix the stone to the grip of a teething ring but this seems gauche.